As interesting as what was there, is what is NOT there—at least not in a big way.
Upstairs in the sessions, people are talking about gameification of real world activities and the evolution of news media, but there aren’t any offerings on the trade show that I believe have gotten it right—yet.
Here are some of the things I saw that I do believe are on the right track, though:
- Social eCRM: We know that people of differing levels of influence are talking about brands and smart brands are using Facebook and Twitter to cultivate brand advocates. But there is a huge opportunity for an online Social eCRM that layers gamification strategies like points and badges and assigns influence values to each of your advocates to be a plug-and-play way for brands to incentivize their biggest and most influential advocates. One company that is trying to enter this space is Soovox:
- Gamification: Applying game dynamics in real-world situations is all the rage in discussions upstairs in the seminars, but I only saw one interesting application of it, in the sporting arena—the same area that Nike forged a path in with Nike+. I guess we’ll have to wait for other practical applications of these techniques. I’m sure there will be plenty. Here’s the sports tracking “game”:
- New journalism models: While there is lots of conversation upstairs about this, not much in the way of technology to deal with it. I did meet some guys who are combining social media data with Boolean logic, preferences, and natural language searching to create a personalized news aggregator that learns your interests and becomes an automatic curator of news content. An interesting step up from Google alerts, but there still is a way to go in this area as well.
Today’s seminar topics will be tomorrow’s real world applications, so I look forward to more and more examples of these ideas taking shape and influencing the way that brands market and that people interact with media.